Refactoring Branch Feedback

[Jean-Baptiste Mardelle]

On Saturday, July 7, 2018 8:51:33 AM CEST, Jacob Kauffmann wrote:
> Hello,
>
> In response to the call for testing, I created a video of 
> myself trying out the new refactoring branch. It's a bit long, 
> but interested parties can watch it here: 
> https://nerdonthestreet.com/episode/tech/testing-kdenlive (or at 
> https://youtu.be/cNLjoajFUUY if you would prefer YouTube.)
>

Hello Jacob!

> I recorded on Thursday night, so it's slightly outdated, but 
> much of it should still be relevant. My issues mainly boiled 
> down to:

Thanks a lot for your feedback, that is very useful for us.


> - New A/V splitting workflow: I already knew this would be a 
> big change for me, and I understand I'll have to adapt. However, 
> there are a number of inconsistencies and quirks which are 
> probably making this change more annoying than it needs to be. 
> (For example, video clips magically turning into audio clips 
> when moved to an audio track, even though you can't put audio 
> clips in a video track.) I saw that you've already made an 
> update to have the default number of audio and video tracks be 
> equal, and that's a good start, but I think more usability 
> testing could be done in this area as a whole. Anything that can 
> be done to make it easier to drag things around with this new 
> system, should be done, in my opinion.

I agree that the current state is a bit annoying compared with the previous 
workflow. We will need to discuss it and make improvments.


> - Performance issues: I'm not sure if it has to do with the 
> AppImage format, but I'm getting noticeably lower performance in 
> the refactoring version compared to the current version. For 
> reference, I've got a 6th generation Core i7 processor and a 
> current-generation flagship GPU, so I'm hoping the performance 
> is more like what I'm used to by the time refactoring becomes 
> stable. I've got no data to back this up, but it seems like some 
> of the performance issues are caused by Kdenlive working really 
> hard to keep audio and video clips locked together while moving 
> them around, since we're doing the whole vertically-symmetrical 
> automatic group moving instead of static grouping like the 
> current version.

Yes, there are several performance issues, but we probably won't solve them 
until 18.08.1

> - Minor UI quirks: again, not sure what's caused by AppImage 
> and what's caused by Kdenlive, but some context menu items are 
> missing (while the corresponding features are still present), 
> the "Split Audio" context menu item shows up in a lot of places 
> where it shouldn't (do we need that any more since it's now 
> always going to be split?), the right-click context menu now 
> doesn't show up until I release the mouse button, etc. I'm also 
> not too pleased with how the timeline tracks, clips, and 
> waveforms look a lot clunkier now. Just because it's 
> professional-grade doesn't mean it can't look nice; on the 
> contrary, it's beginning to look like Cinelerra or something 
> else from the 90's.

I fixed the context menu on click and audio split issues. I agree that UI 
could look nicer but not out top priority

> - Bugs & crashes: the "gain" effect isn't saving my input 
> properly, it seems to be saving 1% of the entered value (e.g. if 
> I type in 200%, it gets set to 2%.) Custom keyboard shortcuts 
> for effects are not working for me. I had some very unexpected 
> behavior when layering several audio clips on top of each other; 
> sometimes, only the topmost (or bottommost) clip would sound 
> while playing. I also had a decent number of crashes. I see that 
> there's a version for "AppImage - Refactoring" in the bug 
> tracker already, so I may try and report some of those issues 
> over there if you want users to start doing that.

Gain should be fixed, as well as audio mixing problems (were occuring after 
a track insertion).

> Hopefully this feedback is helpful, and if anyone has tips on 
> how to deal with the big workflow change, I'd appreciate hearing 
> them. Thanks to everyone who's working on this, I know you're 
> working hard on it & I hope it turns out well.


I will try to upload a new AppImage in the next 2 days so you can do some 
more testing.

> - Jacob Kauffmann
>
> P.S. Someone else mentioned something about an LTS branch. I 
> just wanted to mention that back when you did the port to KF5 
> (and some other refactoring happening at the time), I downloaded 
> the last pre-rewrite version from git and used that for 6-8 
> months while the actual "stable" branch had its issues worked 
> out. I know that's not a great thing for development because it 
> means less feedback, but if anyone else around here is (like me) 
> concerned about the upcoming changes, I wanted to remind people 
> that it's an option. I prefer to stay on the current version, 
> but with the current state of things, I might end up doing the 
> same thing I did last time.
>
>